Saturday, November 18, 2006

David Ortiz/Kevin Millar

I said I'd post this, and many days later, I am fulfilling my promise to you. This is Millar telling some crazy story to Papi. 9/30/06. Can anyone figure out what the hell he's talking about? Click below to watch.

How about this: Write your idea of what he's saying in the comments. I will make an overdubbed version of the best idea. But I reserve the right to go off the board with my own theory. Or just overdub it yourself. Whatever you wanna do.

The Straight Poop

I was going to put this up anyway, but it kind of fits in with the For Your Consideration theme. This was a show that I think was on Nick at Nite in 1990. It was two guys reviewing fake TV shows. On the Television, it was called. Didn't last long. It looks like everyone's third-favorite atheist, Julia Sweeney, is in some of those sketches. imdb and Wikipedia don't seem to know about this.

The Red Sox have re-signed Alex Cora for two years, after bidding two peaches and a Kennedy half dollar for the right to talk to him.

Chan and I are watching Ohio State-Michigan. They showed Michigan fan Derek Jeter at the game--watching from field level. He started clapping when they showed him. I wonder if he saw the irony. I also wonder if, for his expertise in cheering the team on by making his palms collide with each other repeatedly, he'll be named MVP of this football game.

Two Opposable Thumbs Up

Tonight, Chan and I walked over to the alternate universe that is the West Side to see For Your Consideration.

If you've liked the other Christopher Guest films, I'm pretty sure you'll like this one, even though it's not done in mockumentary-style.

The only negative for me was that there wasn't more of everything. I could watch the original three-hour pre-edited version if there was one. There are just so many great actors in these Guest movies. I was so psyched that Ricky Gervais was in this, but he was only in a couple of scenes. But he was great, as was everyone else.

John Michael Higgins WINS! this film. Chan's winner was Catherine O'Hara. Also a good choice. Fred Willard was hilarious as usual. The Spinal Tap trio also did their usual great job, with Shearer having the biggest role of the three. Parker Posey and the dumb blonde Jennifer Coolidge rounded out the win with solid defense. And every naive, never-heard-of-SCTV teen's favorite, Eugene Levy, was also funny, along with Ed Begley and Bob Balaban. Christopher Moynihan, who only was in A Mighty Wind, was the surprise star.

Don't worry about the bad reviews, which I understand exist. Just another awesome Christopher Guest & Co. movie. If you're totally out of the Guest loop, it's about a cast of a ridiculous movie--directed by Guest's character--who find out that there's "Oscar buzz" about them. And hilarity ensues. In the last movie, Guest, besides getting to write a bunch of folk song parodies--which were better than most folk music--got to make up a bunch of fake album covers. This film's equivalent gimmick was a bunch of fake TV shows that featured the actors--the actors in the movie...not the movie, the movie in the movie. The actors playing the actors in....forget it. The point is, they did a great job making fun of the entertainment culture. And I'm guessing if you're an actor you'll think all the Hollywood-mocking is even funnier.

Friday, November 17, 2006

Fill In The Blank

"When you got money like they do, they can go buy whatever they want. They can go out and pay for any player they want," said -------. "And whenever you can do that, you're always going to get guys to come. Even if they want to come or not."

This is from an article in today's Daily News. No, it wasn't me, it was...Gary Sheffield. That's what we've been sayin', Gary...

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Daisuke Matsuzaka or How I Didn't Learn Anything About Anything

Does anyone else feel dirty? If 10 percent of that money we spent to talk to Gyromite/ Mite-y Mouse/ Dangermouse/ DM (see how it all comes back around?) fell out of the plane that, in this analogy, carries the cash from here to Japan, and landed in some country where people don't have the luxury of food to eat....you see where I'm going.

Besides that, I know it's this great business move to capture some of the Japanese market. Supposedly, anyway. Some say it isn't. But I feel like every team should have a chance at it. And I'd hope that there's some underground movement among the Japanese, where people are spreading the word to go against the rich American teams: "The Royals are where it's at! So they don't have any Japanese stars, so what! They would if they could!"

And the fact that this money I'm talking about is just "talkin' money" is ridiculous. So I guess we have two different debates here. This one, and the one where you put all that aside, and just pretend like it's an equal playing field, which we all know isn't truet. But I ain't to proud to debate. The second thing.

So, all that aside (sorry Joy of Sox), it's still a risk. We know this. We also know that we don't have the guy yet. But if we do get him, of course I'll be happy about getting the Japanese community involved in Red Sox baseball. Not because "we" will get "their" dollars, but because I, you know, like diversity. And if something like this is what it takes for some folks to realize the joys of being a Sox fan, even if only a small percentage end up lifers, that's a good thing.

And of course I'll be excited to see him pitch, and, as a bonus, it would be for our side.

And I loooove that we got a guy the Yanks could've got. A guy that would've fit their exact needs. I'd love it if he shows them what a huge mistake they made.

I still can envision a scenario, though, where he's like 6-6 with a 4.17 ERA, and not only are normal people pissed, but the wingnuts are complaining about how they can't get seats because of these people who don't look like them, and the American reporters are complaining they don't have the access they used to. In other words, a bad scene, man.

We will see what happens. No, I wouldn't rather have Barry Zito. I hate Barry Zito. I'd rather have April Zito (elementary scool friend of my sister). I just can't help be weary of this move. And I don't know how much that stems from any of what I said above, about fairness and all that crap. Because I know the guy is amazing. A talented guy, a superstar, in his prime. But Josh Beckett seemed like a sure thing. And he wasn't. I have full confidence Josh gets back to how he was before this year, though. And if Robitussin DM does live up to the hype, It's World Series '07 for us.

The main thing is that we get better as a team. If the "business side" gets in the way of that, we're all gonna be pissed. We know the FO wants to make the future bright. That's good. Assuming the future comes. It's another worry of mine putting such a huge chunk of "future" money into one guy. Aren't we trying to get rid of big contracts? Thoughts getting garbled and incomplete. Must move on to JD Drew.

I seriously think leaving Nixon in right field instead of giving all this money to Drew makes sense. I mean, if this is my other option, I'll take Trot. Drew would do a little better, sure. But they're essentially the same guy, only one tries hard, and is already loved by us and wants to play here. You know who'd I'd take over JD Drew? Wily Mo Pena!

Remember when you had one dude at each position for what seemed like forever? And if they had a bad year, oh well, that's your guy? Yeah, I'm changing the subject. But, yeah, getting rid of Trot now, to me, would have been like getting rid of Dwight Evans after the 1980 season. You don't just get rid of your guy. I know I'm in a fantasy land. So what? Just a better way to have a team. Maybe teach kids some loyalty. Hey! That's why kids today prefer to just get it on with whoever, because their role models are also switching teams like crazy. I have to write a report on this! I just figured out society! (Also, I just never liked JD Drew in general.)

This is why baseball in Cuba is better. You don't leave your team. You wouldn't even think about it.

Oh, and another thing. As long as we're spending like a Steinbrenner in a baseball player store, and talking about shaking up the outfield, can we please stop dickin' around and just get Vernon Wells already?

Alpine White

Remember the Alpine White commercials? I taped this one on May 5th, 1990, during Comic Strip Live.

Note: If that gave you a hankerin' for a chocolate bar (you ain't gettin' Alpine White at this point, though), remember that the company that makes all that gooey brown stuff likes to make people get AIDS. Please consider this.

Joanna Newsom Minor Update

You may remember I saw Joanna in New York, and then Boston, but then opted out of the New Haven show, due to the fact that it was at the shitty Toad's Place. Here's the review of the Toad's show. I think I made a Ys decision.

Hitler, Nevada

That's right, a town in Nevada has made it against the law to place a rectangular piece of cloth that doesn't have red and white stripes and a blue field with fifty white stars on it up on a pole. Terrible job.

I propose a country called Whitetrashia, where all the bigots can go and live by themselves without having to worry about brown skin or nonsensical languages. The beauty part is, once they're all locked inside this walled country, they realize they've just entered a vessel which will be shot out into space never to be heard from again.

Judge Tito

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Culture

It's only November 15th, and not only is Thanksgiving here, but so is Christmas, and next year's baseball season. Pretty soon we'll all just do everything at once, including all events from future years. Your schedule will look like this:

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

NJ Rutgers

Last night, while Chan and I were driving through the city, we heard Steve Sommers on the FAN talk about how suddenly everyone's from Rutgers. (The Rutgers football team, from Piscataway, is suddenly good after a hundred years of crappiness, and had a huge win last Thursday.)

That Sommers is a funny dude. Anyway, I thought, Okay, that sounds about right, everybody jumping on the bandwagon. Yankee "fans," naturally.

Minutes later, I'm driving to New Haven, wherer I am now, and I drive past Yankee Stadium on the thruway, before turning onto 95. (The Jere way of driving from NY to NH.) Now, if you've ever driven past the Stadium, you know that for years, at least as long as I can remember, they've got one of those trailer park sign boards on the outside. The kind where you can rearrange the plastic letters to make pranking, or what have you. Well, I swear to Ged (-man), the sign last night said "NY YANKEES SALUTES RUTGERS."

Well, la ti freakin' da. I'm sure the Yankees and all their fans have fully followed and roted for the shitty Rutgers Scarlet Knights fotball team--they just happened to have never talked about them, wore any of their T-shirts, or acknowledged their existence in any way until, by pure chance, the exact moment they got good. Yankees, you've again proven to the world who the classiest is.

Rutgers, baby! (say in drunken Yankee fan accent)

(I will say that I did enjoy their win Thursday night, and I am psyched for them because of their underdog status, not because I can say I liked them all along should they go undefeated and become a national powerhouse.)

JN At WH

Tonight I dragged Chan to the Joanna Newsom show at Webster Hall. Just to review, Chan and I each became fans of a different blonde-haired, female, quirky singer/songwriter back in '04, and have been following their careers and trying to turn each other on to them ever since. He got me into Nellie Mackaye (it's almost 4 AM, I never can remember how she spells it, and I'm not looking it up right now, thanks), and I've been trying to get him into Joanna Newsom. Newsom hardly ever played the US after her first album came out, so he didn't get to see her until this past summer. Tonight, he would give her another shot.

It now rains on me wherever I go, so I again was soaked to my socks as I arrived at Webster Hall to meet up with Chan. Turns out I'd never been there before. I seem to have gone to all the major NYC concert venues exactly once. They had pizza there, which was good, since all I'd eaten up to that point was half of a celery stick and half of a piece of cauliflower, at my office party right before.

It was good to see the place filling up quickly, in anticipation for Joanna, who was touring for her new album, which comes out tomorrow. She was actually playing her second show of the night, another good sign that she is finally getting the recognition she deserves.

The opening act was PG Six. More like TJ Six. I'll leave it at that. After they finished, I looked up to the sides of the hall and behind me, to see a mass of people leaning over the balcony, like the Beatles were about to deboard the plane.

Joanna came out and did two classics, plus a traditional Scottish song, or something like that. Her vocal is often a half-step behind where it is on the album, but, hey, you try playing the harp and singing at the same time. We can just chalk that up to one of her quirks. Plus it's cool when stuff is different live than it is in the recorded version. Regardless of that, she did a great job, and everyone was psyched. She's in this phase where it's still a select few people that like her, but they're all absolutely nuts over her. After every song, there'd be a full minute of applause. She never had a chance to segue from one song to the next. She had to wait for us to fully show our appreciation after each number.

Then she brought out her new band, which consisted of one woman and four dudes, each playing a wackier instrument than the next. A saw was involved.

But even on the tunes they accompanied her on, their contributions, though awesome, were minimal. I hear the new album has a lot of crazy arrangements. I just hope they didn't overdo it. It should be all about Joanna and her harp. I'm sure anything Steve Albini did on there will be great.

So the band went through the new material with Joanna. These songs are ridiculously long. If you play long songs, and you're not Tool, Jere doesn't like you. However, Joanna is breaking the rule. These songs deserve to be as long as they are. They're like stories anyway. I've only heard them twice at most, but I'm already digging them. Especially the one about meteors, meteorites, and meteoroids.

Then they all left the stage, and she did the now-traditional pre-planned encore. However, this one was earned, as we were going crazy for her to come back out. And she did, by herself, for two more classics. The four classics played tonight were "Bridges & Balloons," "Book of Right On," "Sadie," and "Peach, Plum, Pear."

When I first saw Joanna, it was by accident. But I'll never forget people calling out for her to play "Sadie," and then crying like babies when she did. And I thought, like Swayze of Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost, "What a crock of shit." A few months later, it all made sense to me. So it's cool to hear "Sadie" live. And in "Peach, Plum, Pear," she changed the line "I am blue and unwell" to "I was blue and unwell." I guess she was telling us that she's doing better now than she was when she wrote the tune, and I can relate, as I fell in love with her album while I was blue and unwell, and I'm now in a better place as well. I've recently been thinking about appreciating sad things while you're happy. You should try it.

As we walked back to the car I'm currently borrowing (I'm taking some vacation time this week, if you couldn't tell), Chan told me how great he thought the show was, and that he'll buy Joanna's new album, and get the old one. That's right, people, cynical Chan has seen the light in this case. We have each officially turned the other on to our asterisked musician. He noticed what we Newsomians have known for a while, that she uses an incredibly variety of (big) words in her songs, saying that, like him, she must've gotten the three-book set for Christmas: Thesaurus, Dictionary, and...something else. Good call, Chan. Then I shot the traffic light curl all the way up 3rd Avenue. It was a thing of beauty, I must say. Tomorrow I'm back up to Boston, where I'll see Joanna again.

In Japanese pitcher news, uh, I don't know. Same deal as before. If you're looking for any info before the crack of noon tomorrow, don't look here.

Hector And Vector

The big decision about Gyromite comes tonight at 8. And if that turns out to be true, I'm sure we'll somehow know even less about the whole situation afterwards. This Red Sox fan isn't losing any sleep over any of this stuff. I am losing awake-time, though, as I'm writing about this right now. My opinion in a halfpipe is: I always assumed that if the Yanks wanted the guy, they'd get him. And if they do, I'd have the utmost confidence he'd be a bust. If we get him, we better know what we're doing, and our rotation, considering the way it is now, should be helped even if he only turns out to be an average MLB pitcher.

I don't doubt the guy is an awesome pitcher. You just never know what switching leagues is gonna do to someone. To take a risk that big, you better be pretty close to certain on it. I just hate that the Yanks with their money force other teams to do things they can't really afford. This entire league is unfair and is getting more and more messed up by money. By the minute. The good news is we don't have to watch the Yanks win anymore ever since the curse of Tony Clark kicked in.

I've added clues to the two unanswered quizzes, if you care to take another shot at them.

Joanna Newsom in NYC tonight, and in Boston tomorrow night. I'll be at both. The Wednesday show in New Haven is exactly in the right city and on the right day for me to go, but it's at Toad's Place. I'm done with Toad's. Horrible venue. Plus, two nights in a row of 15 minute songs may be the most I can do.